US election, all over bar the voting?

Updated
September 28, 2012 20:22:00

With millions of voters likely to cast their ballots early in the United States, time's already running out for the gaffe-prone Mitt Romney. James Fallows has been observing Us electiuons since the seventies, and he assesses the prospects for an Obama second term, and for the Republican Party after a likely loss.

MARK COLVIN: The US presidential election isn't till November the 6th but Americans actually started voting today in absentee and early voting.

In many states in 2008 more than 30 per cent voted early and in one, Colarado, the number was as high as 79 per cent.

So for a big chunk of the population, time is literally running out for Mitt Romney to make up the ground he's lost with a series of missteps and problems.

The worst of them was the leaked tape which showed him at a $50 thousand a plate dinner, writing off the poorer 47 per cent of the population.

Only two things could probably bring Romney back into contention now - a blistering performance in his debates with president Obama, or some disastrous misstep by Obama himself.

The journalist James Fallows - who worked with president Jimmy Carter in the late '70s is Professor of US Media at the US Studies Centre at Sydney University.

We discussed this campaign compared to previous ones.

JAMES FALLOWS: Is the model more 1980 when a vulnerable incumbent in the form of Jimmy Carter was knocked off by Ronald Reagan?

Or is it more like '96 or 2004 when also vulnerable incumbents in the form of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were able to hold off Bob Dole and John Kerry and so right now this looks more like the '96 race where Bob Dole, a distinguished public servant, was not able to challenge a Clinton. And Mitt Romney has not seemed to find traction against the vulnerable Obama.

MARK COLVIN: So let's look forwards, let's assume that the polls are right; look at the Obama second term. What's it going to be like and what kind of Congress is he likely to be up against?

JAMES FALLOWS: The Congress, unless something happens that we don't foresee right now, the Republicans will retain control of the House, John Boehner will remain Speaker and the Democrats will not get a 60 vote majority and the Senate, they might even lose control of the Senate.

And that means that Obama is going to have a very difficult legislative sledding ahead of him for the next four years. Probably the main thing he is sure he can do, and something I'm surprised hasn't been publicised more in the campaign, is Supreme Court appointments.

I think everybody here knows how politicised and influential the US Supreme Court has become and so it makes a difference if Obama is able to guide that rather than having Mitt Romney guide the next few appointments.

MARK COLVIN: You mentioned that last time we spoke; is any of the justices likely to retire? Or die?

JAMES FALLOWS: It's in the hands of God for the deaths. You would expect that if Obama is re-elected that Stephen Breyer and Ruth Beta Ginsburg who are, Ruth Beta Ginsburg has been sick. She's had cancer of various kinds. I would expect her to retire and I would imagine that Stephen Breyer would recognise that it would be in the nation's interest for him to retire too.

If Obama is re-elected, you would expect Scalia to hold on as long as he can, also Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, as we discussed before, is physically not a fit man. He's grossly overweight et cetera, so who knows.

But the next president will probably have at least two appointments to make.

MARK COLVIN: Because, unlike our High Court, there is no age limit.

JAMES FALLOWS: One of many, many constitutional flaws in the United States now is the Supreme Court; that the average justices are being appointed younger in life now and they are living longer. So we have the longest tenured court of any time in our history and it's becoming a perverse thing so.

MARK COLVIN: I mean going way back in the past, there have been senile judges.

JAMES FALLOWS: There have been senile judges and there have been some who lived well into their eighties and nineties but they weren't usually appointed as young as they are now.

And it's done in a very crudely and calculatingly actuarial way of making sure you get your person on there so he or she can 40 or 50 years to make law.

MARK COLVIN: But really apart from the Supreme Court, you don't see much chance for legislative movement?

JAMES FALLOWS: I think there will be a significant difference if Obama wins versus Romney but it's largely in the negative. For example, Obama will have a chance to have his medical care plan actually implemented as opposed to efforts to reverse it.

He probably will try to do more on climate issues than he was able to do in his first term. How much he's able to do depends on the standoff in the United States government and whether the Republican Party decides to keep moving further right if it loses or to come back to the middle.

MARK COLVIN: Well that was going to be my next question; what happens to the Republican Party if it suffers another major loss?

JAMES FALLOWS: I tell you what I expect, which is not what I hope. What I expect is the narrative will be, 'If only we'd had Paul Ryan at the top, if only we'd really gone hard line, if only we had Newt Gingrich or Michele Bachmann. You can't win with a fake conservative like Romney.

So, I expect that will be their narrative and I think the propulsive forces on the right just have the energy still in the Republican Party. Here's the lose/lose aspect of that. I think it's bad for the Republicans to sort of make themselves a more and more niche party; essentially the south and the Great Plains.

It's also bad for the country if we have this extremist blocking party as opposed to their saying let's recalibrate, let's try to do something like we did after the Goldwater defeat when they came back with Nixon but eventually with Reagan.

MARK COLVIN: I saw an article fairly recently that said they need more than 60 per cent of the white, male vote this time. And that next time, particularly if they go further right, they're going to need even more because of the demographic changes in America.

Aren't they on a hiding to nothing if they go further towards the Tea Party?

JAMES FALLOWS: You would think that and the cautionary example would be California, which was about 15 years ahead of the national trend in this way because of demographic differences in California.

And for those who weren't studying California politics back in the 1980s, then Governor Pete Wilson had a very tough anti-immigrant policy with the so-called Prop 187 and that made Latinos in California essentially become Democrats and since then I believe there is no state-wide Republican official in California now.

And they have barely one third of each House of the legislature there.

MARK COLVIN: James Fallows, chair in US media at the US Studies Centre at Sydney University. He'll be speaking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney this weekend.

There'll be a longer version of that interview on our website from this evening.